


Precipice

by newsbypostcard



Series: Precipice [2]
Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 11:40:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/849140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newsbypostcard/pseuds/newsbypostcard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leo is going to save Jim. Leo is <em>going</em> to save Jim, Leo <em>is</em> going to save Jim, and Leo <em>will not break down.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Precipice

Leo had extracted the blood he needed from Khan -- far _more_ than he’d needed, really, but he’d wanted to make sure that son of bitch could be buried deep in the depths of hell for all he cared without Leo needing another damn thing from him -- and he and Spock both had made goddamn fucking sure they were satisfied the bastard was down for the count in the cryochamber before they let security wheel him away. 

Then, without missing a beat, Leo had sent Spock to Starfleet medical to get patched up; packed a few pieces of equipment into a crate; perched the crate unceremoniously overtop of the window on Jim’s cryochamber; and wheeled Jim out of sickbay.

On the one hand, Leo was desensitized, his iron focus allowing him to block out any thought that wasn’t immediately relevant to the task ahead of him. 

But on the other hand, more than anything else: he absolutely _needed_ to get the _fuck_ away from _people._

At the moment, Leo hated the living with every fibre of his being. Their breathing batted in playful mockery at his eardrums, the fact of their pulses infuriating him; and he thought if any one of them tried to offer him any of the well-polished platitudes he knew were dancing at their lips, he might well snap their neck. 

Leo was consumed with a quiet rage, white hot tendrils curling incessantly over his stomach, lashing up into his chest, tugging at his heart, and it was all he could do to keep the scream beat down inside him.

So he had asked, while he’d still had a grasp on his nerves, a trusted resident named Martinez to set a lab up for him in a Starfleet research wing, requesting that she be gone before his approximate arrival to save her the displeasure of his disposition. He wanted to speak to exactly no one. 

He needed to work alone.

Leo was always better off on his own.

\-----

Leo worked for forty-six straight hours, his focus breaking only briefly at the outset when he realized with a flare of temper that he was working in a testing lab. Movement out of the corner of his eye informed him of people in the observation area, and he shot an immediate glance replete with daggers in the direction of the chamber, where Spock and Uhura stood in a half-embrace and watched Leo with attentive sobriety. They quickly got the message and turned to leave with acknowledging nods to Leo’s preference; but word had evidently spread about Leo’s efforts, and the observation chamber became a rotating circus of Enterprise and Starfleet personnel in various states of injury, all watching him with mournful expressions.

It was the absolute fucking worst thing Leo could imagine.

“Would you get your asses the everloving _fuck_ outta here and let me work?” he shouted eventually, his voice cracking in a way that sounded delightfully deranged. The chamber was quickly vacated and remained empty after that, to Leo’s profound relief; but that also meant that, as the hours dragged on, silence and empty space were in abundance, forcing panic to eventually close an icy fist around his throat as he realized the full weight of what exactly it was he was doing.

He shuddered and supported himself on the counter with deep, steadying breaths. His focus was only as driven as his hands were busy.

So in the periods where he had to wait while one of his godforsaken machines performed some function or other to sync the blood types together -- god, how he hated the slow march of time -- he started talking to Jim for company.

He’d left Jim’s cryochamber in the middle of the room, for some reason, unwilling to set him in the room’s margins or tucked away in a corner, and equally unwilling to have him close enough to his workstations to potentially catch a glimpse of his languid face with a careless eyecast. He wasn’t sure what the fuck he was doing at first, casting words into the center of the room in a way decidedly different than he would usually talk to himself; but he soon realized that he was speaking as he usually did when he was unpacking his shitty day at the bar, one of Jim’s feet hooked around the back of Leo’s heel under the table in latent support as he ranted about some clinical mishap or an impertinent patient who’d gone over his head in an attempt to undermine his authority.

“You hearing this, kid?” he mumbled to the room. “I’d still rather talk to you than any other person when you’re fucking _unconscious_ and encased in a soundproof pod in front of me.” He gave a hollow sound approximating a chuckle. “You got me good, all right.”

Leo found he initially enjoyed Jim’s silence, in a strange sense, entertaining himself by finishing entire thoughts for once in his goddamn life; but the aching void left by the absence of Jim’s voice soon forced Leo to cut his comments back. He eventually fell silent altogether when, somewhere around the twenty-two hour mark, he had unintentionally paused to wait for Jim’s response, looking up and expecting to see Jim’s grinning face leaning toward him conversationally -- only to see the cryochamber instead. He’d damn near lost his footing with the force of the realization that he might never actually see that sort of animation in Jim’s face again; so he’d taken to the room’s mournful echo instead.

There were still moments, though, when grief overtook and enveloped him anyway, and in these moments Leo had again leaned hard against the counter and shut his eyes against the waves of defeat crashing against him. It had happened the first and second times the serum of Khan’s blood had rejected Jim’s blood outright, and again in the moment after Khan’s blood had almost bonded with Jim’s as it was supposed to, only to then consume and eradicate Jim’s platelets altogether. The sense of perdition lingered heavier still in his limbs with the failures he met after the first thirty hours of work, and Leo’s rigid focus started to slide sideways to remind him he’d been running off stims and vitamin hypos for bordering on three days, that he remained human despite his best attempts to shirk the basic needs for solid food and sleep, to remind him that he remained fallible.

Jim’s cryochamber sat in blatant ridicule of Leo’s scientific ability in the center of the room. 

With each passing hour, grief and apprehension crushed the oxygen out of him in degrees.

But in hour forty-six, Leo found a compound that worked, something that when applied to Jim’s blood seemed to bolster it enough the serum to latch onto and regenerate. 

Leo breathed for the first time in what felt like hours, carding both hands through his hair and cursing with the bewildered adrenaline of success. He quickly ran another two trials with the compound, results positive each time, and Leo was a fucking genius.

But Leo was also nothing if not thorough, even now -- hell, _especially_ now -- and he was not prepared to accept the results of anything without seeing their longer-term effects.

He took several deep, stabilizing breaths and hazarded a quick tidy of his workspace. He grabbed his comm to message Spock, asking him to arrange security to watch the lab while he took a nap, and slid an affectionate hand across the top of Jim’s cryochamber as he staggered toward the exit.

\-----

He slept for seventeen hours.

\-----

Jim’s blood was wrong when he got back to the lab.

It was coagulating together in a sickly sort of way, the regeneration obviously gone awry, and Leo felt his breakfast threaten to repeat on him as he sterilized himself quickly under the sonic shower. A hurried look under the magnifier told him that the regeneration process had worked _too_ well, Khan’s blood not merely _re_ generating but then _generating still_ , as though the signal required to stop some growth process had never been sent.

To Leo, it felt as though Khan’s blood was intentionally disobeying the rules in some cruel final salute to the effective murder of James Kirk.

Leo was not calm.

He stared blankly at the cryochamber as he felt self-loathing crawl hotly into his stomach, as he remembered all the times Jim’s body had reacted unusually to something Leo’d given to him, swelling or vomiting or passing out unexpectedly more times than Leo could count. He remembered, too, that Jim’s blood could have broken down in immeasurable ways from the severity of his exposure to the radiation, which Scotty had flatly told him must have been total. 

Nobody had studied the early stages of organic cell degradation in cases this severe before; this was true. Nobody had thought to freeze anyone fresh out of warp core level radiation exposure before long enough to study them.

But he should have accounted for this. 

Fuck.

He should have _fucking accounted f **or thi--**_

A shatter and a clamor, and Leo’s ears were ringing, eyes focusing white heat at the spot on the wall where he’d just thrown the magnifier. His chest heaved in desperate, furious bursts, a scream ring in his ears for solid seconds before he was present enough to realize it had been his own.

He clenched his fists and allocated himself thirty seconds to let the rage course through his veins, across his skin, his eyes closed, shoulders heaving. Then, with gargantuan effort, he forced his breath into a normal rhythm; compelled the tension out of his muscles; walked mechanically over to the cleaning station; and reached for the handheld sanitizing vacuum.

He cleaned up the mess -- calmly, evenly, methodically, hands steady -- and got back to work.

\-----

He had once again been aware of Spock’s presence in the observation bay after an hour of his renewed effort; and he’d still been watching when the first of Leo’s trials again failed, when he set knotted fists down on the counter and _breathed, just, fucking, breathed_ , to make sure he kept it together; when he injected himself with another set of stims; when he reset his equipment; when he started again. Then Spock had vanished, had reappeared in the entryway of the lab, had stood there until Leo’s eyes flicked up at him, and had finally hazarded a few paces into the lab when it became clear that Leo was not going to launch anything at his head for daring to present himself in the flesh.

Spock watched Leo work for a few moments from the other side of the room, maintaining an aching distance from Jim’s cryochamber, approaching only as far as his own sense of reverence and decency would allow. It was fucking weird. Leo hated being watched.

“What do you want, Spock,” Leo inquired tonelessly.

“I wish to--” Spock began; then he suddenly frowned, swallowed, tried again. “With utmost respect, Doctor, I suspect your assumption that Khan is human may be leading you astray. I think what you are attempting is in fact closer to an interspecies transfusion, an area of medicine which, unless I am mistaken, is not your expertise.”

Leo shut his eyes and exhaled a single, staggering breath in an attempt for mastery over the fury and bile that climbed up his throat. His tone of absolute control betrayed his proximity to complete unravel: “If you’re suggesting for a single goddamned second that I am not _qualified_ \--”

“Certainly not,” Spock intoned rapidly. “There is surely no one more qualified than you for this endeavor, Doctor McCoy.”

The blood pounding in Leo’s ears clicked back a few decibel levels as he distantly registered the compliment. “Then what _are_ you suggesting?”

“It is not my intention to suggest anything, Doctor. I wish only to offer you my expertise as Science Officer in the form of my services as your assistant.”

Leo clenched his jaw, stared at Spock, and to his own chagrin contemplated the request. “You know your way around a lab, Spock?”

“I have instructed Interspecies Ethics at Starfleet Academy for three years, which required completion of advanced training in interspecies biological compatibility. I freely admit I am not as familiar with this equipment, but I am motivated to--” Spock broke off and took a breath. “I would like to assist in any way that I can.”

Leo held Spock’s gaze just long enough to read the sincerity and meaning in his face before pointing to a shelf holding glass slides. “Go on and sanitize, then, and hand me a stack of those, would you?”

Spock inclined his head and smoothly obliged.

\-----

For the most part, Spock had barely made his presence known, except to make Leo’s job easier. He’d spoken little, generally responding only to Leo’s exasperated rhetorical questions about why the synthesis wasn’t taking, giving carefully calculated advice intended to propel Leo’s scientific genius in the right direction rather than to oppress it. The dynamic was comfortable, Spock’s competence apparent, and as they got closer to the solution Leo eventually entrusted him with the task of carrying out his own trial. The two of them worked on for hours in taciturn silence, speaking only to compare notes or to request use of some instrument.

If he was honest, Leo was fucking grateful for Spock’s company, his removedness, his even persistence. His presence had been steadying in those fleeting moments when emotion had gotten the best of him, giving Leo something environmental to focus on, a locus of monochromatic energy in a room pulsing red. 

To his own disbelief, he’d even briefly felt envy for Spock and his seeming ability to keep his emotions under wraps. He, too, fleetingly desired to work only because he felt compelled to by logic, not to _need_ to as he did now, his state of all-consuming grief and denial forcing this raw drive. But he took note of Spock’s occasionally flared nostrils, the tick in his jaw of undeniable irritation when the trial wasn’t performing as Spock had predicted it would, and decided that maybe his own emotions were running high, if a little further under the surface than Leo’s own.

The feeling of envy, then, had been blessedly fleeting.

He made a mental note never to mention this little incident to Jim.

\-----

It had been shortly after sunrise when they’d gotten close to the solution. 

Leo had broken the lab’s heavy silence with a quietly uttered “There, now,” and Spock had abandoned his latest trial to watch Leo’s as the serum had sequentially bonded, regenerated, and eventually slowed to a gradual halt as it was supposed to. 

Leo watched the compound’s synthesis with the raptest of attentions, a subdued sense of elation mounting slowly in his lungs, instincts screaming at him that they’d found the key. But it wasn’t long before leaden doubt settled in to weigh him down just as fast, exhaustion reminding him of his cynicism; and he continued to watch the trial’s results unfold with a blank expression, unwilling to allow himself to believe it could be successful for long.

Leo continued to stare in such high tension that he failed to take note when the doors slid open.

“Spock,” came Uhura’s gentle tone, “the briefings will be starting again any minute. You need to be there.”

Leo faintly registered the fact of the briefings -- _oh, god, the briefings ahead of him_ \-- and noted distantly how peculiar it was that he hadn’t been called to one in the days that had passed since the Enterprise’s docking. He realized that the Enterprise crew was probably fighting tooth and nail to let Leo work uninterrupted until some medical consensus as to Jim’s fate could be reached; and once again he felt warm gratitude spread through his system, finally penetrating his desensitized stasis, forcing him to blink back into reality.

Spock snapped his gaze immediately to Leo at Uhura’s words, his expression betraying that he was clearly unwilling to leave before the work was done. But Leo shook his head, nodding for Spock to go. “This is down to a one-person job again, Spock,” he told him, surprised at the clarity of his own voice. “I sure as all hell appreciated your help tonight, but we’re close to it now, and there’s nothing more you can do here. If this serum doesn’t work, the next one will.”

“Doctor McCoy, I’m sure--”

“Spock,” Leo said evenly, setting a heavy hand on Spock’s shoulder. “It’ll work.”

Spock’s shoulder and facial features slackened simultaneously, his expression taking Leo aback with unexpected emotion; but he quickly regained his composure with two steady blinks and nodded curtly. “Please keep me apprised as to any developments,” he requested.

“Certainly,” Leo confirmed; and Uhura gave Leo an encouraging smile as she strode out alongside Spock, reaching for his hand to give it a quick and surreptitious squeeze.

Leo returned his gaze to the trial upon their departure and stared at it for a while longer before finally forcing his limbs to move, deftly setting up two more with identical variables as the first. Then he made his way past the cryochamber to reach for the sandwich Uhura had left for him on a table near the lab’s entrance.

The silence of the lab tormented him as he ate.

Leo felt the fatigue pulling determinedly at his eyes, and he leaned against the wall, head connecting with the cool surface as he tried to relax the constricted muscles of his neck and shoulders. “You’d better fucking appreciate this,” he told the cryochamber tiredly through a tasteless mouthful of food. “If you wake up and tell me in your swollen-headed insolence that gee, I really shouldn’t have, I might kill you again myself.”

Leo again caught himself waiting, and Jim still did not reply.

\-----

The trials were successful, Leo registered faintly, his unbelieving stare lingering amidst the sound of blood pounding in his ears when he looked to confirm that Jim’s repaired platelets were _still_ not congealing in their erstwhile sickly way. The trials were still successful after one hour; again clearly successful after two; confirmed successful at three.

It had _actually fucking worked._

Leo felt only apprehension, any sense of victory deadened by the exhaustion that accompanied twenty-six solid hours of work, as he called intensive care. He pinched the bridge of his nose in a show of attempted control as he argued the semantics of whether or not he could order a room for a dead man, then lost his temper anyway before being transferred to the Director of the clinic. He had tried to explain without explaining, but it had been the mention of the USS Enterprise that had given the Director pause, and eventually Leo was able to negotiate deductions from his salary for the use of a room in the Executive wing. 

Then he packed the serum away, carelessly leaving the lab in a disastrous state, and wheeled Jim to the clinic his own damn self.

\-----

The room was bright, which annoyed Leo; it seemed disgraceful to him that the sun would bother to continue shining, and he hated the reminder. But on the other hand, for the potential of the miracle he was about to attempt, maybe it was fitting.

Spock had left him a code that allowed him to bypass the security settings on the cryochamber, to allow him to open the door for just long enough to inject the serum into Kirk’s neck without thawing him out completely. He inputted it quickly, not bothering to give himself any time to think too hard about what he had to do, and gritted his teeth against the inevitable glimpse of Jim’s pallor, his slackened expression, the slant of his lifeless limbs as he descended the hypo into the chamber. He withdrew his arm with just time enough before the door snapped automatically shut, and exhaled sharply as he input the code to reverse the cryogenic process.

He stood briefly aback, unsure of the technology, unsure of his cure, unsure if he wanted to watch if the process didn’t take, if Jim didn’t wake up. But then he stepped forward with a remaining modicum of courage -- and hit the button to execute. 

He forced himself to watch the display report the present function, to make sure the process was undertaking as it was supposed to, to register the estimated time of completion some four hours hence.

Time was, officially, an asshole.

\-----

He set up the equipment he would need for the next stage of events and settled into a chair in the corner of room, allowing himself a brief doze that was apprehensively wrought with memories of past surgical failures. He woke every so often to make sure Kirk wasn’t somehow showing any premature signs of life -- “patchy, archaic technology,” he muttered once after hallucinating the twitch of a pulse in Jim’s neck -- but otherwise the hours passed in a haze of sleeping, sitting, checking his comm for the time, and actively hating every goddamn second that crawled by.

And then, finally, the chamber beeped.

Leo leapt out of the chair and rushed to the display, which flashed a few final processes before the entire top of it shuddered open to allow Leo access. He hurriedly wheeled the chamber over to the bed and dragged Jim from one surface to another, then hooked him up to the relevant machines with a fluidity that surprised Leo given his present state of frantic undoing.

His hands upheld their steadiness as he began chest compressions, his own racing heart rate the only indication that this was anything other than a standard patient procedure. He counted the depressions methodically, after a minute stopping to grab Jim’s wrist, his fingers defaulting to where a pulse should have been.

There was nothing.

Leo pressed on.

The waves of panic began to splay themselves across his psyche in minute four when the displays still did not change, when his compressions continued to have no effect, when his fingers still did not find what they was looking for in Jim’s wrist. In minute five, Leo emitted an involuntary noise and forced himself to quit pumping Jim’s chest lest he break his ribs in his urgency; his hands flew to Jim’s wrist to find a pulse, and he sunk into a chair and held steadfastly on. 

As the seconds crept by with no movement in Jim’s veins, Leo leaned his other elbow against the bed and held his head in his hand, biting his lip hard enough to draw considerable blood, unwilling to accept that this was over.

But then -- Leo felt it. It was faint enough to be almost imperceptible, but -- undeniably -- a pulse was there.

He snapped his head up to the sight of _numbers on the displays_ , signs of life, indications communicating something other than fatality. He was mildly dizzy as he stood too quickly, flicking on the ventilator and attaching the mask to Jim’s face. Then he took Jim’s wrist again and watched with an ever-increasing flood of overjoyed disbelief as Jim’s vitals climbed, became more certain, and eventually, stabilized, his pulse strengthening under his fingertips.

Leo remarked with sudden surprise that the bed was quaking slightly, and it was his own hands that were the culprit -- these hands that never shook -- as they leaned against Jim’s mattress, still holding his wrist. The trembles slowly spread throughout Leo’s limbs, slight at first; but soon amplified to form great, staggering pulses, radiating outward from Leo’s torso and wracking his entire form.

He set Jim’s hand gently down and collapsed again into a chair, propping an elbow against his knee and holding a quivering wrist against his mouth. He wondered fleetingly if he might be sick; but instead it was a sob that escaped him, followed quickly by another and then another, coming in dry, heaving gulps for a solid minute before the actual tears hit. 

Leo resisted the flood of emotion only momentarily before he realized that this was allowable, now, that he’d done what he’d set out to do; and he folded into himself as each staggering sob brought a wave of relief crashing against his ribcage: _Jim is alive. Jim is alive. Jim is alive._

\-----

But alive though Jim may have been, Khan’s blood was still far more robust than his own, and still the wrong type, and Jim had never been great with metabolizing foreign bodies. It soon became apparent to Leo that Jim’s coma would be extended when he failed to awaken in the first twenty-four hours, when his vitals dipped repeatedly, prompting Leo’s intermittent intervention to prevent him from crashing. Leo did not leave the room for the whole of this first day after his revival, opting to sleep in chairs, unwilling to pass Jim’s care over to anyone else. 

Spock and Uhura had come by almost as soon as Leo’s comm message had been sent, and Leo had almost fainted at the sight of the grin that spread across Spock’s face. “A man brought back from the dead and a smiling Vulcan,” he’d muttered to himself; “now I’ve seen everything.” But company soon began to grate upon him, especially after Uhura had returned some hours later with a relief doctor to try to convince him to go home and to bed -- a request that Leo steadfastly refused, at least until she told him his first briefing was in the morning, and that not attending was not an option.

“I don’t give a goddamn flying monkey’s ass in space about mandatory briefings--”

“You know they will kick you out of Starfleet if you don’t go,” she had told him briskly, “and then you _really_ won’t be able to take care of Jim. And don’t you dare try to move him, Leo, I know what you’re thinking; that would be far more trouble than attending a briefing and you know it. Now we have a rotating schedule of Enterprise medical personnel who are all too happy to take shifts to make sure Jim’s properly cared for. Go home. Get some sleep. You look closer to death than he does.”

So Leo had begrudgingly filled his relief doctor in; tried inadequately to clarify the metabolic complications of interspecies superblood transfusions; taken Uhura’s suggestion to leave that job to Spock when he showed up; and with a final check of Jim’s stats trudged his sorry ass home.

The shower was hot; the bed felt amazingly plush under his skin.

Leo felt himself reapproaching humanity.

\-----

The next week passed in a blur of briefings and medical tests, Leo confirming that Khan’s blood had regenerated Jim’s cells just fine but was still causing effects in his system, overwhelming his immune response. But though his core temperature remained high of normal -- a better sign than not, in Leo’s books, given he’d been both dead and frozen a matter of days earlier -- Jim continued to strengthen each day, soon breathing unassisted, his pupils responding normally to light stimulus within three days, his bodily regulation processes apparently unobstructed after four.

Leo slept mostly in four-hour spans, and only then when he was forced out by his relief. As the days went on without any significant mishaps while he was out of the room, however, he came to feel a significant sense of gratitude for those who took over for him while the briefings continued. It allowed him to re-establish some sense of routine. He started to know what came next, because he’d done it the day before. That was soothing.

But it remained nevertheless that Leo was still operating mechanically through his days, unconvinced that Jim would make a full recovery. A coma was a tough thing to come out of. He had no prior evidence to base his assumptions on. He would not allow himself to hope.

\-----

Late at night, despite himself, he would sometimes sit with Jim, again falling into the old habit of telling him about his day. He rested his arm close enough to Jim’s to feel the heat radiating off of it, but mostly he felt afraid to touch him with any degree of affection or familiarity, with anything more than what was medically necessary, in case that jinxed it, somehow, in case that interfered with whatever Jim’s body was trying to do.

Instead of physical touch, Leo’s eyes scanned over every inch of him while he talked, taking account of Jim’s features, the healthy flush mounting in his cheeks with each passing day, the increasing stability of his vitals ticking away on the monitors.

Jim still did not reply.

\-----

Leo was in the room the first time Jim had awoken.

His back had been turned as he’d tended to another interrogation into Jim’s bloodwork at the workstation he’d set up in the corner of the room. He thought he’d hallucinated the stirring at first -- a trick his mind was fond of playing -- but he’d paused instinctually just in case. 

And then he’d heard it -- the fond croak of “Bones” from the other side of the room, the sound damn near giving him a heart attack, forcing the test tube he’d been holding to crash at the floor by his feet.

He swivelled on his heel in time to see only a fleeting flash of electric blue, Jim’s eyelids flickering tauntingly shut before Leo could catch his gaze, and Leo hastened forward with fluid agility. “Jim?” he asked softly, agitation forcing his tone low as he took Jim’s wrist between his fingers, his own heart racing. He checked Jim’s pulse unnecessarily just to feel the blood pumping beneath his fingers, if absolutely nothing else, to remember that he was warm and still alive. “Jim, you there?”

Leo watched Jim’s face for a moment, but saw no change. His heart sunk as he decided quickly that Jim was already unconscious again; but then Jim’s lips parted, skin clinging diseasedly to itself in contravention of the effort. 

“You save me, Bones?” Jim rasped, brow furrowing lightly.

“I, uh.” Leo’s voice cracked, and he was forced to pause by an involuntary exhale that escaped him out of sheer, gnawing relief. Jim’s hand swayed aimlessly around, searching for Leo’s own even as his fingers held his wrist, and Leo caught it easily, crouching in place beside Jim’s bed, cupping the hand with both of his own and holding it to his lips. “Yeah, Jim, I might have,” he breathed incredulously.

Jim managed the faintest of smiles, exhaling something that sounded vaguely like _Typical,_ before he truly did slip soundly back into unconsciousness, fingers slackening in Leo’s grasp.

Leo crouched stalk-still for several full minutes, holding firmly onto Jim’s hand in spite of its relaxing grip, watching Jim’s chest rise and fall with slow, steady, unwavering breaths, until his vision clouded with unexpected tears. 

And that was the third time Leo broke, shoulders quaking silently as he breathed great gulps of unfathomable relief, tears coursing determinedly down his cheeks as he realized then with final confidence:

Jim might very well actually come out of this.

\-----

After that, Leo thought he had control back.

He did manage it for a considerable while. People started talking to him as though he was made of something considerably sturdier than glass, so he suspected the homicidal glare must at least have receded in his eyes. His biting comments also regained their usual lilting quality, half-filled with mockery and as frequent as they ever were.

Leo had commed Spock to let him know that Jim had woken up, and did so again when Jim eyes had flickered open again the following morning, just for long enough to emit another faint croak of “goddamn, coming back to life is exhausting,” before once again slipping beneath the undertow of sleep. Spock had commed him back a few hours later to let him know he was on his way directly from his briefing, and as though on cue Jim had awakened a third time, this time significantly more responsive.

With witnesses, Leo hadn’t been sure how to react; so he chose to deflect all emotion immediately away and offer a casual reply to Jim’s most recent statement:

“Oh, don’t be so melodramatic; you were barely dead.”

He bantered on with even wit as he checked Jim’s vitals redundantly for the hundredth time, ignoring the stupid flood of cheer that pounded through his veins, silently witnessing Jim’s competent conversation with Spock with an undeniable spring in his step.

He felt very proud of himself. He had the situation under control. Jim was both alive and conscious, and Leo was not breaking down.

\-----

Leo had spent the following three days communicating with Jim mostly in medical jargon and excessively casual banter, both of which had been unnecessarily thick with sarcasm and stilted mockery. The reasons for this were initially at least partly circumstantial; news that Jim was likely to make a full recovery had quickly spread, and Jim’s room had hosted a varied cast of Enterprise crew, Starfleet colleagues, and, at points, even Starfleet admirals inquiring after his status (and, undoubtedly, statements). But this still did not explain why Leo had begun avoiding Jim’s gaze and direct contact with his skin, both of which he usually relished in and looked for excuses to get _more_ of rather than less.

Truth be told, since Jim had revived, Leo had felt _off_. He wasn’t experiencing an emotion he could quite pinpoint; he’d felt more natural even when he’d been deep in the throes of grieving, at least understanding his reactions and dispositions with greater clarity than he currently did. He was sure Jim had noticed _whatever this was_ , his own lingering glances more than making up for Leo’s avoidance of eye contact; but more witnesses meant both distraction and the professional necessity for more subdued interaction. So for the first time since this whole saga had begun, Leo had actively invited company in, giving himself more time to dance around Jim with whatever his goddamn problem was.

But after the first flood of people had come to see Jim and as Jim’s waking hours became more numerous, privacy between them had been more common, and Leo had accordingly found himself searching for reasons to avoid even being in the room. Despite his confusion as to _why_ this was his preference, Leo found he was quite serious about the avoidance, even speaking more slowly in the already endless ongoing briefings so as to draw them out for as long as possible. But when the briefings still managed to adjourn at something that might’ve passed for a reasonable hour and as Jim’s need for ongoing medical attention declined steadily, he’d begged off his duties as primary care doctor on the grounds of imagined exhaustion and resorted to asking Uhura to look in on Jim instead.

Although, he convinced himself, maybe the exhaustion wasn’t so imagined; Leo was also sleeping in a lot. But then, he reasoned, he’d recently been awake a lot.

\-----

It was the morning of the fourth day after Jim had awoken for good -- apprehensively for Leo a Sunday free of briefings -- when he came out of the shower to see Jim leaning casually against his doorframe, clad in civilian clothing and smiling faintly as Leo appeared.

“Oh,” Leo said shortly, freezing in place with his arms laced through the sleeves of his t-shirt. “Hi.”

Jim’s expression wore tired incredulity. “That’s it? I come back from the _dead_ and that’s what you have to say to me?”

A half-smile hitched on Leo’s face despite himself and he pulled the shirt over his head before stepping slowly toward Jim. “This isn’t bed. What are you doing here?”

“I came to see where you were at,” Jim said, slipping an arm around Leo’s waist, “since you weren’t seeing me. What’s up with that?”

“I just,” Leo shook his head, “I’ve been tired. You think coming back to life is exhausting? Try raising the dead.”

Jim breathed laughter and pressed his lips against Leo’s, leaning back with a frown when Leo didn’t respond as he’d expected. “Seriously, what’s up with you?”

“Not convinced you should be up and about. Who cleared you?”

“Roberts. Sort of. I guess I didn’t give him much of a choice.”

“Bullheaded bastard.”

“Yeah, yeah. Stop grousing and kiss me properly, will you? I’m not going to break.”

So Leo leaned in, trying to break from the sense of apprehension building within him. He did remain gentle at first but soon found himself getting lost in feeling and sensation, his hands running themselves under Jim’s sweater and across his emaciated torso and chest, delving his tongue deep into Jim’s mouth in an attempt to taste as much of him as possible, relishing the heat of him in full contact for the first time in a solid three weeks.

And then he’d had to break away, touching his forehead against Jim’s and breathing hard with the force of the emotion that was hardening in his chest. “Fuck you,” he whispered.

“Okay, Bones,” Jim replied contentedly, thumb stroking the back of Leo’s neck. “Just give me a few days, okay? _That_ might still break me.”

Something deep in Leo’s stomach jolted, and white liquid spilled hotly into his limbs. “ _Fuck_ you,” he said again, voice low.

Jim blinked hard and leaned back, regarding Leo with concern. “Bones?”

“Fuck you.” Cinders blazed deep inside his chest cavity, and Leo pushed Jim against the wall, stepping swiftly to the other side of the room before he advanced to punching Kirk in his entire fucking face. “Fuck you. Fuck you. _Fuck_ you!”

“Bones, Bones,” Jim assured hurriedly, stepping forward and extending a placating hand. “Calm down.”

“Fuck you,” he said again. “Don’t tell me to calm down.”

Jim took a deep breath. “Bones. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay!” Leo spat, control slipping steadily away from him. “It’s nowhere near fucking okay! Are you fucking serious, Jim? You just fucking _went_ , and you--” Leo waved a furious hand. “You _walked,_ into a _fucking warp core_ , Jim, you just strolled on in like it was another day at the christing park, without any regard for your own life, without any fucking regard for your own safety, and I’m supposed to think this is okay?” Leo’s chest heaved as he watched Jim’s face calculate his words. “Do you know what I went through? Do you understand what you did to me? I’m in goddamn fucking _sickbay_ tending to quotidian bullshit like broken bones and common lacerations when suddenly I get some belated transmission from engineering telling me that you’re completely fucking _dead,_ Jim. Not _dying_ , not in the process but if I can get to you in time I might be able to repair the damage to your cells. You’re _already dead_. That’s it. That’s all I get. That’s just reality, now. You’re just dead. That’s what I get to try to accept.”

“I know, Bones,” Jim breathed softly, but Leo was not finished.

“No, I really don’t think that you do. Because the next thing that happens is that your dead ass is lying on my autopsy table in a goddamn _body bag_. I have to unzip this fucking thing and see your lifeless face lying there, just _lying there_ , Jim, and there’s not a fucking thing I can do about it.” Leo paused to breathe, and Jim stared back at him in stunned silence, face thick with sorrow and empathy. “That’s the last time I see you, Jim,” Leo continued, forcing control into his tone. “That’s the last image I have of you. I don’t get a fucking goodbye. I get your face in a bodybag.”

“Bones, I--”

“And then Scotty,” Leo interrupted, sardonic chuckle escaping him despite himself. “Scotty tells me that you _instructed_ him not to call me. He had his hand on the comm, right? He had his hand right there, ready to call me, as he fucking should have. And you actually had the nerve and the audacity to tell him to _stop._ You actually told him, with intent, _not to tell me what was happening to you._ Because -- why? Something about not wanting me to try to save you?”

“Okay, that’s not--”

“Yes it very fucking is, Jim. That’s exactly what happened. We’ve--” Leo stammered to a halt, unsure of the accurate words to use, and tried again in a cracked tone. “We’ve been fucking for four solid years, and I don’t even rank a _message_?” He stared Jim down. “You did not want me to save you. You did not grant me that opportunity. You wanted to die.”

“No, Leo, I didn’t,” Jim argued exhaustedly.

“Then explain it to me. I really do hope you have an explanation for this, James. Because I’ve been to hell and back. I mean it. I’ve been through the absolute fucking ringer.”

“I know.”

“You don’t.”

“Okay, I don’t. Are you going to let me talk?”

Leo stared at him in silence.

“I didn’t let Scotty call you,” Jim began evenly, “because I was as good as dead when I made it back down from the warp core. I knew that in the same way that I knew that you would’ve tried to save me, and failed. You would’ve opened the hatch while the radiation was still unrestricted and exposed yourself to it for the sake of the nonexistent possibility of my survival. You would have exposed yourself to the same deadly force that killed me, to save me, and you would’ve died in the process.”

“I wouldn’t have cared!” Leo roared.

“That’s exactly my point!” Jim emphasized. “That’s my entire fucking point. _You wouldn’t have cared._ You wouldn’t have cared about your own life if it meant saving mine. And that’s something we have in _common_ , Bones. We’re the _same_ in that respect.” Jim paused, now himself breathing heavily with the effort of the explanation. “I wasn’t walking into the warp core because I had a fucking _death wish_ , Bones. I was walking in on the offchance I could save every single crew member aboard the Enterprise. I was walking in on the offchance that I could save _you._ ” He raised his arms in a gesture of surrender. “And guess what? It worked. I would have died either way. If I hadn’t done it, we’d have burned up in the atmosphere, each and every one of us. I stand by my decision to walk into that warp core. I’d do it again a thousand times over if it meant the same result.”

Leo took a deep, steadying breath. “That’s not the point,” he said eventually.

Jim stared back at him. “No,” he said quietly. “I guess it’s not. But I … I also stand by asking Scotty not to call you, as painful as I know that must be to you. Because if I’d saved everyone on the Enterprise only to have you die too, that would’ve seriously put a damper on the whole heroic-final-moments vibe I had going on.” 

Jim cracked a hopeful smile, but Leo scowled harder at him, and Jim dropped the levity immediately. “Look, Bones,” he continued seriously, taking a step hesitantly forward, “I already knew what you’d’ve done if he’d’ve called you in, and that would’ve meant your death in vain. And as much as the idea of dying of radiation poisoning together in each other’s arms sounds kinda romantic in a fucked-up, Romeo-and-Juliet kind of way, I wasn’t prepared to kill you as a function of my own inevitable death.” He shrugged. “If you want me to apologize for that, I’m sorry, but I can’t. I stand by it. I stand by it all.”

Jim searched Leo’s gaze, giving him the opportunity to respond; but Leo remained silent. Jim started slowly forward, approaching Leo with concerted caution. “What I am sorry for? Is that I didn’t … do a better death. I wish it had been different. I wish I hadn’t shown up on your autopsy table in a body bag. I wish that hadn’t almost been the last you’d seen of me.” He cracked a distant, tired smile. “I wish I could’ve died of old age in your fucking house in Georgia or whatever the shit is that normal people do.” He shook his head. “But you need to prepare for the next time, Bones, because I’m not like that. I don’t do normal. I do what needs to be done. And so do you.” He shrugged again. “Sue us both.”

Leo held Jim’s serious blue gaze, still breathing heavily.

“You gave _Spock_ your final moments,” he croaked eventually.

Jim shut his eyes in regret. “I know.”

Leo watched Jim carefully, his anger winding rapidly down as Jim opened his eyes and held Leo’s gaze for a solid minute. “You didn’t call me,” Leo said faintly.

“I didn’t call you. I know.” Jim took another step forward, tugging hesitantly at one of Leo’s fingers. “I know, Bones. I didn’t say goodbye.”

Leo let his forehead fall against Jim’s, one hand bringing his now-angular hip in toward him as his anger quickly replaced itself with a terribly heavy heart. Jim stepped easily into the embrace, wrapping his arm across Leo’s back, the other hand resting on the back of his neck. “I betrayed the significance of our relationship,” he assuaged softly as Leo’s hand carded itself fervidly through Jim’s hair, Jim leaning into him, lips brushing lightly against his own. “I didn’t give you closure. And I’m _sorry_ , Bones, fuck. I’m so sorry for that.”

Leo had kissed him furiously in spite of the hot tears spilling out of the corners of his eyes, and Jim soon moved his mouth to kiss them away, trailing whispers of “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you, I’m sorry” over his cheeks, his temples, his eyelids, his jawline, before moving back to his mouth and kissing him hard and deep; and then Leo well and truly thought he was _really_ done breaking down.

\-----

Being around Jim was like dangling one foot over the edge of a towering precipice: equal parts risk and thrill, stability and danger. Leo had known this from the beginning, but it still somehow always took him by surprise when his emotional limits were tested. Leo loved and hated this in equal parts; but it was what made their relationship what it was. He didn’t imagine he’d love Jim the same way if it was ever any different.

Accordingly, Leo was never totally in control again after that, his nerves frazzling at the very outset whenever Jim went off-ship. 

But then, given Jim, he didn’t expect control had ever _really_ been his.


End file.
